Congo: Anguish far exceeds aid

December 17, 2007|By Paul Salopek, Tribune foreign correspondent

Congo's chaotic civil war was supposed to wind down in 2003 with the signing of a peace deal. In a burst of hope, the nation even held its first free elections last year. But today the weak, sprawling giant of central Africa appears to be sliding back into large-scale warfare along its anarchic eastern frontier, which like the American West of the 1850s is ruled by gangs of hard men with guns.

A skinny renegade general named Laurent Nkunda is battling the Congolese government and rival militias, claiming to protect Congo's ethnic Tutsi minority. His soldiers have displaced up to 30,000 villagers a day in the region's shifting war zones. The dazed refugees swarm down country roads in long, snaking, barefooted processions -- men pushing wheelbarrows of salvaged food, women giving birth, and bewildered kids wandering lost among strangers.

Less publicity

A recent visit to the worst-hit area, the lushly forested province of North Kivu, revealed massive populations constantly on the run, with spontaneous refugee camps popping up on roadsides and in muddy stadiums. At one teeming camp near the town of Rutshuru, families hunkered in banana-leaf huts described how neighbors had been shot point-blank in the face and dumped down pit latrines, or herded into buildings and burned alive.

Congo surpasses Darfur not just in war dead. Experts say it is probably home to the grimmest mass rape epidemic in the world.

"We've seen cases from 3 years old to 70," said Claude Masumbuko, a doctor at HEAL Africa, a charity hospital that specializes in sexual assaults. "All the different armed groups rape women here -- the army, the rebels, the local militias. It comes with looting a village. It demoralizes the enemy."

Even seasoned aid workers blanch at the scale and viciousness of Congo's scourge of rape. Women commonly suffer fistulas, or internal ruptures, because attackers penetrate them with foreign objects such as guns. The UN has logged tens of thousands of rapes in eastern Congo, only a fraction, experts say, of the real caseload.

Not that many Americans would know.

According to the Tyndall Report, a media organization that monitors nightly television news broadcasts on ABC, NBC and CBS, there have been 16 major reports on Darfur over the past year and one on Congo.

A search of the LexisNexis news database turns up roughly 230 significant newspaper articles on Darfur in the past year; Congo merited about 60.

Finally, while the plight of Darfur is spotlighted by U.S. celebrities -- actress and UN goodwill ambassador Jolie has journeyed to Darfur and neighboring Chad three times, but has stopped by Congo just once, unofficially -- the world's most lethal war remains a virtual Hollywood orphan. Lucy Liu, star of the "Charlie's Angels" films, visited eastern Congo in June.

Lest cynics say that such publicity is frivolous, an aid group called the International Rescue Committee tallied the benefits of public awareness in 2005. Per capita foreign aid to Darfur stood at $300; in war-affected regions of Congo it was $11.

Why the jarring disparity?

Darfur's war, at least the beginning, had billboard-friendly heroes and villains, some experts say, while Congo's violence has always been much messier. Others say that American evangelicals laid the groundwork for the Save Darfur movement by grabbing the Bush administration's ear on Sudan's earlier north-south war, which pitted Muslims against Christians. Most mention a single word: genocide.

"That's the key," said Jerry Fowler, a human-rights specialist at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, an organization that helped found the Save Darfur campaign.

"Genocide awareness is seeping through a new generation of Americans in ways it hasn't before," Fowler said. "It's a narrative the American public can get its head around."

The targeting of Darfur's ethnic African farmers by the Sudanese government resonates powerfully with many American Jews, who draw a parallel with the Jewish Holocaust, although all sides in the Darfur conflict are Muslim. Jewish groups have backed the Save Darfur movement from the start.

Cross-border conflict

Even here, however, Congo-related ironies abound.

One of the most successful advocacy tools for the Save Darfur movement, activists concede, is the Oscar-nominated film "Hotel Rwanda," which dramatized the horrific 1994 genocide in Rwanda, a butchery that killed 800,000 people while the world averted its gaze.

Yet Rwanda has nothing to do with Darfur -- and everything to do with Congo's ongoing bloodletting.

The Hutu killers who masterminded the slaughter of Rwanda's Tutsis have taken up residence in the jungles of neighboring Congo. Their toxic ethnic politics have given rise to Tutsi rebels like Nkunda and threaten to drag the whole region into a cross-border conflict. This connection is passed over in Americans' intense focus on Darfur.

Still, Congo's compassion deficit can't all be laid to the shrewd branding of Darfur.